In the following review, Wolf offers a mixed appraisal of the Royal National Theater's modern dress production of The Winter's Tale directed by Nicholas Hytner. Wolf praises the successful portrayal of the play's second half, but comments that this success does not fully compensate for the slow and uninspiring first half of the play.

A substantial sea change takes place between the two settings of The Winter's Tale—the fraught court of Sicilia and the roisterous sheep-shearing of Bohemia. But in Nicholas Hytner's modern-dress production of Shakespeare's great late romance, that's nothing compared to the contrast between an underpowered and desultory first act, complete with an utterly perfunctory “exit pursued by a bear,” and the wonder induced after the intermission in a play virtually defined by that word. “My heart wept blood,” says the widowed Paulina...